Bombs/nukes aren't going to kill off the human race. THIS (or something very close to it) will. Every medical professional you know already knows it, and has just accepted it...Just ask them. We don't discuss it because, frankly, we know there's not a GD thing we can do about it. The Hot Zone was not entirely without foundation.

There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an H7N9 avian flu that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!

voodoomedic:Bombs/nukes aren't going to kill off the human race. THIS (or something very close to it) will. Every medical professional you know already knows it, and has just accepted it...Just ask them. We don't discuss it because, frankly, we know there's not a GD thing we can do about it. The Hot Zone was not entirely without foundation.

/been nice knowing all of you//BIE for a going away present?

Glad I read your profile and know you not to be taken seriously./not like my handle would inspire confidence either

voodoomedic:Bombs/nukes aren't going to kill off the human race. THIS (or something very close to it) will. Every medical professional you know already knows it, and has just accepted it...Just ask them. We don't discuss it because, frankly, we know there's not a GD thing we can do about it. The Hot Zone was not entirely without foundation.

/been nice knowing all of you//BIE for a going away present?

Yeah, especially when conventional wisdom says that the thing to do when you're sick is go hang around more sick people.

/doesn't go the hospital until it's absolutely necessary//last year's trip was for dysentery; doc told her she'd probably been fighting it for a month before it finally got the upper hand///cipro is a nasty antibiotic btw

I'm sure we'll be visited by the anecdote brigade soon enough, telling stories of how they got sick the day they got the flu shot, or that the last pandemic turned out to be typical flu, even though it killed 5 times as many children under 5 as the typical flu.

Maybe. Those initial statistics can be misleading because it's usually "25% of the people who were sick enough to go to a hospital and were then diagnosed with this particular strain have died". You need more data such as how many others in the community were exposed without developing significant symptoms.

• A total of 82 H7N9 cases have been reported in China, including 17 that have ended in death.• In 2010, there were about 219 million (±70 million) malaria cases ... and an estimated 660,000 (±173,000) malaria deaths

parahaps:J. Frank Parnell: If it really was so easy for a virus to greatly depopulate the human race, i think they'd have done it already.

Uh...

It hasn't happened that I can recall since the advent of modern medicine. That isn't to say that it couldn't, especially in the case of a Twelve Monkeys-esque man-made virus terrorist attack, but I don't see anything ever taking as big a chunk of the population out as the black plague did back in the day.

voodoomedic:Bombs/nukes aren't going to kill off the human race. THIS (or something very close to it) will. Every medical professional you know already knows it, and has just accepted it...Just ask them. We don't discuss it because, frankly, we know there's not a GD thing we can do about it. The Hot Zone was not entirely without foundation.

TuteTibiImperes:parahaps: J. Frank Parnell: If it really was so easy for a virus to greatly depopulate the human race, i think they'd have done it already.

Uh...

It hasn't happened that I can recall since the advent of modern medicine. That isn't to say that it couldn't, especially in the case of a Twelve Monkeys-esque man-made virus terrorist attack, but I don't see anything ever taking as big a chunk of the population out as the black plague did back in the day.

I guess you can arbitrarily decide that 'modern medicine' started after the last big one, but the flu pandemic of 1918 killed 3-5% of the world's population. 50-100 million people.

Maybe. Those initial statistics can be misleading because it's usually "25% of the people who were sick enough to go to a hospital and were then diagnosed with this particular strain have died". You need more data such as how many others in the community were exposed without developing significant symptoms.

Thisy that thisy.

I'm pretty sure there are lots of cases that are nothing but a headache or tummy ache. But maybe those dead pigs and birds on the Chinese rivers know something we don't.

parahaps:TuteTibiImperes: parahaps: J. Frank Parnell: If it really was so easy for a virus to greatly depopulate the human race, i think they'd have done it already.

Uh...

It hasn't happened that I can recall since the advent of modern medicine. That isn't to say that it couldn't, especially in the case of a Twelve Monkeys-esque man-made virus terrorist attack, but I don't see anything ever taking as big a chunk of the population out as the black plague did back in the day.

I guess you can arbitrarily decide that 'modern medicine' started after the last big one, but the flu pandemic of 1918 killed 3-5% of the world's population. 50-100 million people.

Post germ theory and the first vaccines, but before an influenza specific vaccine and antibiotics, sort of a gray area I'd say.

parahaps:TuteTibiImperes: parahaps: J. Frank Parnell: If it really was so easy for a virus to greatly depopulate the human race, i think they'd have done it already.

Uh...

It hasn't happened that I can recall since the advent of modern medicine. That isn't to say that it couldn't, especially in the case of a Twelve Monkeys-esque man-made virus terrorist attack, but I don't see anything ever taking as big a chunk of the population out as the black plague did back in the day.

I guess you can arbitrarily decide that 'modern medicine' started after the last big one, but the flu pandemic of 1918 killed 3-5% of the world's population. 50-100 million people.

Modern medicine starting after the 1918 pandemic is actually a fair statement. Your odds of surviving a severe cut on your arm was not significantly better in 1918 CE than it was in 1918 BCE. If you got an infection in a deep cut, you probably lost the limb, or at least its use. It wasn't until antibiotics that things actually started getting significantly better.

/Demon Under the Microscope is a great book//"A gentleman's hands are never dirty." - Physician, dismissing an Austrian doctor who had suggested that washing hands between seeing patients should be mandatory in their profession///The Austrian doctor ended up committing suicide once he figured out how many mothers he killed through his ignorance over the course of his career, and he was unable to get others in his profession anywhere in Europe to adopt cleanliness when he figured it out, despite his hospital's phenomenally low mortality rate

There has never been a virus that even came close to killing everyone. But what i was talking about are modern engineered viruses. I'm pretty sure it's been tried, and found to be harder than you'd think.

Isolated populations used to have high death-tolls from viruses that developed in other populations, but one of the good things about the global travel thing we have going on now is we've already been exposed to pretty much every humans strain out there, which just leaves these crossovers from animals, but again, it's doubtful we'll see one that kills most people. The biggest death toll of any virus in recorded history is probably the black plague, and even the most generous estimates only put that at half the population of Europe dying. More realistic estimates put it at 25%.

I've pointed out before that it's not even in the interest of viruses to kill people. Any deaths are accidental side effects from the methods used to try and transmit to other bodies. If they were to successfully kill off all of their host species, they would doom themselves. After millions of years evolving alongside a species they need them to keep living.

voodoomedic:Bombs/nukes aren't going to kill off the human race. THIS (or something very close to it) will. Every medical professional you know already knows it, and has just accepted it...Just ask them. We don't discuss it because, frankly, we know there's not a GD thing we can do about it. The Hot Zone was not entirely without foundation.